Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (review)
Karen Thornber
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Volume 72, Number 1, June 2012, pp. 195-202 (Article)
Published by Harvard-Yenching Institute DOI: 10.1353/jas.2012.0005
For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jas/summary/v072/72.1.thornber.html
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ican imperialism in the @rst decade of the twenty-@rst century, a time when the discourses of empire and the rhetorics of civilizing missions (and their necessary savages) have made a dramatic comeback. Tropics of Savagery is thus guided, Tierney writes “by the conviction that we can deepen our awareness of history and beAer understand our present times by examining the rhetoric of a defunct empire” (p. B). In asking us to reexamine our own notions of savagery, conquest, and empire, Tropics of Savagery is in good company with the @nest of recent books like the Classics scholar Tim Rood’s American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America $om the Mexican War to Iraq.CD Both works ask us to engage the past in order to engage the present, and they eloquently tes- tify to the fact that Kipling clearly holds no monopoly on narratives of imperial conquest.
Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora ,0 J$68 T&+. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, <>'>. Pp. xii + E>B. FG).>>.
Karen !ornber, Harvard University Jing Tsu’s outstanding new book Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora perceptively analyzes the institutionalization and dissemination of the modern Chinese language from the late nineteenth century to the present by focusing on sinophone writing in the Chinese- speaking world and on key bilingual forays. His study investigates everything from recent calls for the merger of simpli@ed and traditional Chinese scriptsIcalls that reJect not only the largest divide in the modern Chinese language but also the greater, enduring conJict between spo- ken sounds and wriAen scriptIto lesser known contentions about the modern Chinese language in the literatures of its diasporic communi- ties around the world. Discrediting common perceptions of the “native language,” including renowned literary scholar Claudio Guillén’s assumption of “biological delight” in the literature of one’s “mother tongue,” Tsu rightly argues that with global migration, multilingual
10 Tim Rood, American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America $om the Mexican War to Iraq (London: Duckworth Overlook, <>'>).
*+,-$&."/ ,0 1." 234#34/-5"67.$68 96&1$1+1" !"#: ;<.' =<>'< '(B !"#$"%& upbringings, and forcible alienation from early languages, linguistic nativity no longer can be taken as a “once-and-for-all endowment” (p. '<). Instead, to use Jing Tsu’s words, this nativity is a “repeating pro- cess of acquisition”; entry into language is a privilege, one that, mar- keted under rubrics such as “mother tongue,” “literacy,” and “standard language,” is unevenly distributed. He implications of this insight are signi@cant and require us to rethink the production of national lan- guages and literatures, as well as that of literature and criticism more generally. Tsu analyzes “sinophone” as primarily a problem of sound and script, making her book a groundbreaking work in sinophone studies. His volume is also essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese literature, comparative literature, world literature, cultural studies, and diaspora studies. One of the most important contributions of Sound and Script is its introduction of the concept of “literary governance,” which Tsu describes as a global process that “emerges wherever there is an open or veiled, imposed or voluntary coordination between linguistic antag- onisms and the idea of the ‘native speaker’” (p. <). Literary gover- nance, as Tsu understands it, diKers from Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and from similar conceptions of state power. At the core of literary governance is the notion of linguistic nativityIsome- thing that can be both deeply personal and explicitly institutionalized but tends to support a range of linguistic allegiances, from centers of literary and cultural prestige to disregarded margins. He term “gov- ernance” emphasizes strategies of collaboration across diKerent occa- sions of language use, and Tsu is careful to note that her use of the concept of governance does not signify control from the top down, but instead points to the ways that “linguistic alliances and literary produc- tion organize themselves around incentives of recognition and power” (p. '<). He “linguistic antagonisms” of literary governance result from tensions between, on the one hand, the political and material pro- cesses of accessing language and script through learned orthography and, on the other, reliance on a notion of a primary, naturalized lin- guistic home (the “mother tongue”) to support cultural cohesiveness. He conJicting dimensions of such phenomena as language standard- ization and reform, native speakers and mother tongues, and national literatures and diasporic writings can result in strong rivalries. But they also somewhat paradoxically can facilitate local, national, and global !"#$"%& '(;
literary cooperation. Ingeniously examining language as a “medium of access” rather than a “right to identity,” Sound and Script reveals how the Chinese language, as “national” or “mother” tongue, travels across borders of all kinds. His allows us to reconceptualize notions of iden- tityIand concepts such as nativism, nostalgia, and nationalism, as well as “Chineseness”Ias spaces for manipulating linguistic capital. Even more importantly, especially for scholars of comparative litera- ture, Tsu highlights how scholars have minimized subnational diKer- ences in order to highlight nation-based comparisons. He book more than lives up to its stated aim of providing “a framework that compels an account of the hidden linguistic assumptions that support the gov- ernance of any literary @eld” (p. 'G). Sound and Script is divided into eight chapters, including an intro- duction, each of which insightfully discusses an aspect of literary gov- ernance by focusing on a speci@c linguistic issue. Chapter < examines the late nineteenth-century historical construction of Chinese as a national language. He chapter opens with a reference to Wang Zhao’s draL proposal for the “Mandarin alphabet” (guanhua zimu), a new phonetic writing system for the Mandarin dialect of Chinese that he developed during his two-year exile in Tokyo. Tsu then segues into a discussion of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aAempts to change the Chinese writing system, believed by many to be at fault for China’s “evolutionary belatedness” (p. 'M). She tracks the material- ity of the Chinese language, oKering a fascinating discussion of exper- iments with phonetic scripts that were intended to take the place of Chinese characters and ultimately unify language. She also emphasizes the broader importance of late Qing script reforms that instigated con- tinued language wars and struggles for cultural identity both within China and across translocal networks. Tsu’s focus on “the materiality of modern writing in relation to the variability in speech” (p. '() opens new pathways in the study of mod- ern Chinese-language literature. Most impressive in the second chap- ter is how Tsu builds on the notion of the sinophone as articulated by Shu-mei Shih and others.C By focusing on the uneasy alliances between sound and script in Chinese writing, Tsu demonstrates the
1 See, for instance, Andrea RiemenschniAer and Deborah L. Madsen, eds., Diasporic Histories: Cultural Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Uni- versity Press, <>>(); Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across '(M !"#$"%& importance of recognizing the multiplicity of linguistic and cultural mediums, and of looking beyond national authority and individual institutions. Here she ingeniously examines not intonations as a mat- ter of style within a de@ned literary spaceIas is customary in scholar- ship on Chinese, East Asian, and comparative literatureIbut, instead, “how spoken sounds enter the arena of textual combat at all” (p. <'). Chapter E examines further pursuits of the power of a national, standard language by turning to the famed Chinese bilingual anglo- phone writer Lin Yutang and his Chinese-language typewriter in par- ticular. Tsu convincingly argues that the new technology of writing signi@ed by the Chinese typewriterIfor which Lin @led a patent appli- cation with the U.S. Patent ONce in '(GB aLer thirty years of research and experimentationIhad signi@cant rami@cations during the Cold War. Lin’s method of Chinese-language classi@cation, which made the logograph commutable into an alphabetic logic of sequentiality, solidi- @ed the perception that the Chinese language is directly opposed to alphabetic writing. By seAing the typewriter to Chinese radicals rather than alphabetic keys, Lin countered entrenched perceptions of the alphabet as a superior, more civilized form of script. Tsu here uncov- ers the forgoAen history of how Lin’s typewriter, which appeared at the critical juncture between the mechanical and the computer ages, joined the global struggle for language dominance. Especially noteworthy is Tsu’s discussion of Lin’s conception of pidgin English. For Lin, pidgin English was “neither creole nor patois.” Instead, it was “retranslation, created through a secondary export from Chinese back into English” (pp. B<–BE). Lin saw transla- tion as a “distinct, and even proud, process of retribalization toward anti- institutional language use. . . . By de@ning translation as pidgin, Lin thereby underscores the force of nativist transformation whenever English is absorbed in a foreign tongue. . . . included in Lin’s notion of pidgin English are also transliterations that might not carry any seman- tic meaning but that serve the sole purpose of reseAing the sound of an uAerance, as in ‘the already popular tu-se (‘toast’) in modern Chi- nese usage’” (p. BE). Also signi@cant is how Tsu rede@nes the rivalry between the Chinese character and Basic (British American Scienti@c the Paci%c (Berkeley: University of California Press, <>>;); Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays (Leiden: Brill, <>'>). !"#$"%& '((
International Commercial) English as a maAer not of the exercise of imperial or national power but, instead, of “naming the very linguis- tic condition by which one can participate in globality at all” (p. BE). It was, aLer all, this typewriter that “catapulted the Chinese language to the forefront of the competing technologies of global languages” (p. M>). He chapter’s concluding section on the impact of Lin’s type- writer on the era of machine translation is equally absorbing, partic- ularly in its observation that Lin’s indexical system, unlike Norbert Wiener’s prediction that Chinese would serve as another code for Eng- lish, undermined “the basic assumption of the alphabetic ‘word’ as the irreducible unit in translation by oKering a logic of the alphabetic ideo- graph” (p. ;;). Tsu’s book here reveals how the technologization of writing brings a national language into an international arena, crossing boundaries between native and nonnative Chinese speakers and users. Chapter G places Lin Yutang in the context of other Chinese anglo- phone writers, including Eileen Chang and Ha Jin, “who share a sense of betrayal because of the language they use” (p. M'). Eschewing the familiar focus on translation that oLen characterizes studies of mul- tilingualism, Tsu examines what happens when creative texts cannot make linguistic crossings (when, as Tsu argues, they literally cannot be successfully translated), or when they cross linguistic borders so suc- cessfully that writers are accused of plagiarism. Sound and Script also interrogates the very concepts of translation and bilingualism, exam- ining the passageways they open between audiences and the world, as well as the function of linguistic allegiances in a world requiring make- shiL alliances. His chapter argues provocatively and convincingly for translation to be understood as “enforcing new closures” even as it “grows meanings” (p. M<). Tsu demonstrates how Lin and other writers are “too bilingual for [their] own good” (p. M(); not only do they lack a single linguis- tic comfort zone, but also their facility in switching languages comes with real consequences, most notably, their becoming arbiters of a false commonality. Tsu rightly notes that “the concern is less the native informant’s betrayal, or the foreign Sinologist’s imperfectly mas- tered understanding, than the native speaker’s undecided relation to the national object behind the Chinese language” (pp. ('–(<) as well as to audiences both anglophone and Chinese. Rather than theoriz- ing, or even romanticizing bilingual writers as mobile in termediaries, <>> !"#$"%& as is customary among literary scholars, Tsu reveals them as prod- ucts of the contradictions between two cultural worlds, and thus as being neithe r broker nor agent. Lin Yutang provides an intriguing comparison with Eileen Chang, whose self-translations were com- mercial failures, as well as with Ha Jin, who has been sharply criti- cized for betraying the mother tongue. Most interesting here is how Lin Yutang, Eileen Chang, and Ha Jin all use one dominant language against another (English against Chinese, Chinese against English), raising issues of loyalty and allegiance to multiple cultures. Tsu turns to the linguistic encounter between Chinese and French in the follow- ing chapter in the context of early twentieth-century Chinese concep- tions of world literature. But the discussions of Chinese-anglophone writers in Chapter G might have bene@ted from comparison with their Chinese-francophone, lusophone, or japanophone counterparts. In addition, Tsu might have further theorized the notion of untranslat- ability to address the varying degrees of diNculty that translating into diKerent languages poses. (For example, a Chinese-language text that cannot cross the linguistic border into English might be translatable into Japanese.) By reconceptualizing the Chinese language as a global medium that gains and loses power through accommodation and access, the @Lh chapter turns to the global space in which Chinese literary pro- duction operates. Tsu discusses late nineteenth-century Chinese con- ceptions of world literature, focusing on Chen Jitong, the @rst bilingual Chinese francophone writer, and his insights into how China could most eKectively navigate an international political space where liter- ary and cultural capital depended on access to a world audience. Sound and Script shows that world literature for Chen Jitong and his con- temporaries was part of a larger rivalry between French and Chinese, and ultimately Eastern and Western, cultures; invocations of world lit- erature were “part of an elaborate, long-range strategy to reintroduce China’s dominance at the heart of the world vision” (p. ''E). Heir approach involved creating “a supranational arena that would elevate national [including Chinese] interests under the guise of transcending them” (p. '<)), one that “restructures the modality of competition and international rivalry through the civil governance of leAers” (p. '
dialects of Chinese that initially de@ned the terms of national-language standardization in the Mandarin-dominated sinoscape. He book demonstrates how Ng and other writers recon@gured notions of lin- eage, genealogy, and kinship to highlight the segmentations enacted by diaspora and have thereby revealed the permeability of lines of cultural descent. In so doing, they have explicitly confronted traditional sino- centrism and modern Chinese literary genealogies. Chapter M examines additional challenges to the Chinese center, ones that enact vital changes through cohabitation and accommoda- tion. Tsu’s focus here is Zhang Guixing, a writer whose manipulation of the pictograph, the quintessential sinoscript, oKers new perspec- tives on the diNculties of accessing education in Chinese during Brit- ish colonial rule and postcolonial independence in Malaysia. Zhang’s aAention to both the philosophical origins and the privilege of writ- ing compels us to think about language as a space of both local and for- eign habitation, concepts that are visually represented in the work of the Chinese artists Gu Wenda and Xu Bing. Xu, for instance, envisions the Chinese language as “the substrate of all languages, ideographic or alphabetic” (p.